Not Threat,But Threatening: Potential Causes and Consequences of Gay Innumeracy

Existing literature on numeracy suggests that people are likely to perceive outgroups as larger if the group is perceived as threatening. However, some studies also suggest that numeracy is a function of wishful thinking or even a lack of political knowledge. We engage the literature on numeracy of the gay and lesbian population by employing data from 1977 and 2013 surveys of American adults. We examine the factors that are associated with estimating the gay population. Next we explore how innumeracy may shape attitudes about homosexuality and gay rights. Our findings suggest that estimates of the gay population are partly a function of knowledge, and perhaps wishful thinking, but not threat. However, our analysis also reveals that higher estimates of the gay population are associated with less support for gay civil rights in the current era and were not a factor in the past.     

Raising charitable children: the effects of verbal socialization and role-modeling on children’s giving

This paper uses nationally-representative data from the PSID and CDS to estimate the causal effects of two parent socialization actions—talking to children about giving and role-modeling—on children’s decisions whether or not to give to charity. We develop an identification framework based on the intra-household allocation and cultural transmission literatures that shows how different assumptions about parental response to time-varying unobserved changes in children’s prosocial values can be combined with the child fixed effects estimate and the difference between siblings’ over-time-differences estimate to infer a bound on the causal effect of parental action to socialize their children. Under the identifying assumption we think is most reasonable for socializing the willingness to give to charity, that parents treat the socialization actions of others as cultural substitutes, our estimates imply that talking to children about giving raises the probability of children’s giving by at least .13. We find no evidence that parental role-modeling affects children’s giving, except among non-African-American girls. The identification framework and substantive results have implications for those with a general interest in using data from naturalistic settings to estimate causal effects of parental socialization actions, those interested in the external validity of laboratory findings, and those interested in the socialization of warm glow.     

Rights Versus Morality: Online Debate About Decriminalization of Gay Sex in Singapore

This article presents a quantitative content analysis of 10,473 comments from two opposing online petitions related to the legal status of a section of the penal code in Singapore used to ban sex between men. Results indicate numerous significant differences in how the two sides discussed the law and its significance. In particular, they used different types of arguments to support their views and expressed different kinds of concerns over the potential impact of changing or maintaining the law. The patterns of language use seem to reflect distinctly different approaches to the debate and suggest the difficulty of finding common ground amid this contentious social issue, but they also reveal similarities to how Western cultures have framed the debate.     

A note on the rate of intergenerational convergence of earnings

We show that “convergence” to mean earnings in intergenerational earnings mobility models will be a function not only of the single-generation correlation of earnings, but also of the properties of the unobserved stochastic distribution of shocks to earnings. Received: 24 March 1998/Accepted: 13 November 1998     

Change in disability-free life expectancy for Americans 70 years old and older*

In this article, we examine changes in life expectancy free of disability using longitudinal data collected from 1984 through 2000 from two cohorts who composed the Longitudinal Studies of Aging I and II. Life expectancies with and without ADL and/or IADL disability are calculated using a Markov-based multistate life table approach. At age 70, disability-free life expectancy increased over a 10-year period by 0.6 of a year in the later cohort, which was the same as the increase in total life expectancy, both increases marginally statistically significant. The average length of expected life with IADL and ADL disability did not change. Changes in disability-free life expectancy resulted from decreases in disability incidence and increases in the incidence of recovery from disability across the two survey cohorts. Age-specific mortality among the ADL disabled declined significantly in the later cohort after age 80. Mortality for the IADL disabled and the nondisabled did not change significantly. Those with ADL disability at age 70 experienced substantial increases in both total life expectancy and disability-free life expectancy. These results indicate the importance of efforts both to prevent and delay disability and to promote recovery from disability for increasing life expectancy without disability. Results also indicate that while reductions in incidence and increases in recovery work to decrease population prevalence of disability, declining mortality among the disabled has been a force toward increasing disability prevalence.     

Social costs of displacement in Louisiana after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita

Hundreds of thousands of Louisiana citizens were displaced from their homes as a result of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. Of those displaced within Louisiana some relocated to other parishes, some to other residences within the same parish, and others were able to return to their pre-storm residence. This article draws upon data gathered by the 2006 Louisiana Health and Population Survey to examine the social costs of displacement across 18 Louisiana parishes approximately 1 year after the hurricanes. Specifically, we examine how displacement affected housing, economic, and health outcomes for individuals and families. Further, we compare the implications of two types of displacement (1) internal displacement—within-parish relocation versus (2) external displacement—relocation across parish lines. We found that the displaced had lower odds of owning their homes, living in detached housing, and retaining access to primary health care facilities. The displaced were also more likely to be unemployed and exhibit symptoms consistent with severe mental illness. The externally displaced suffered income declines. These trends are critically important for understanding both the short- and long-term ramifications of displacement after disaster. Our findings have implications for theories, policy makers, and planners considering the larger social costs of disaster and large-scale displacement.     

Exploring the barriers of quitting smoking during pregnancy: A systematic review of qualitative studies

Smoking during pregnancy is widely known to increase health risks to the foetus, and understanding the quitting process during pregnancy is essential in order to realise national government targets. Qualitative studies have been used in order to gain a greater understanding of the quitting process and the objective of this systematic review was to examine and evaluate qualitative studies that have investigated the psychological and social factors around women attempting to quit smoking during pregnancy. Electronic databases and journals were searched with seven articles included in this review. The findings demonstrated that women were aware of the health risks to the foetus associated with smoking; however knowledge of potential health risks was not sufficient to motivate them to quit. Several barriers to quitting were identified which included willpower, role, and meaning of smoking, issues with cessation provision, changes in relationship interactions, understanding of facts, changes in smell and taste and influence of family and friends. A further interesting finding was that cessation service provision by health professionals was viewed negatively by women. It was concluded that there is a shortage of qualitative studies that concentrate on the specific difficulties that pregnant women face when trying to quit smoking.     

Rural Disadvantage and Malaria in Less‐Developed Nations: A Cross‐National Investigation of a Neglected Disease

Although often forgotten among people in affluent nations, malaria represents a leading global health concern in poor, rural countries. Malaria is traditionally thought of as a rural disease, given the close proximity of rural households to mosquito disease vectors. However, more insight is needed to investigate the larger social, economic, and environmental conditions that perhaps interact with rurality to explain why some nations continue to have high levels of prevalence of this preventable and eradicable parasitic infection. We employ structural equation modeling to efficiently test for both direct and indirect effects of rurality. The results demonstrate that rurality works in important indirect ways; although rurality has indirect links to malaria through export agriculture, health spending, and sociohealth resources, careful decomposition of the indirect effects illustrates that the indirect effects through heath spending and sociohealth resources are most important. Overall, the findings suggest that rural vulnerabilities to malaria are not inherent and can be largely addressed by increasing public health provisions among rural populations.     

Detecting interaction links in a collaborating group using manually annotated data

Identification of network linkages through direct observation of human interaction has long been a staple of network analysis. It is, however, time consuming and labor intensive when undertaken by human observers. This paper describes the development and validation of a two-stage methodology for automating the identification of network links from direct observation of groups in which members are free to move around a space. The initial manual annotation stage utilizes a web-based interface to support manual coding of physical location, posture, and gaze direction of group members from snapshots taken from video recordings of groups. The second stage uses the manually annotated data as input for machine learning to automate the inference of links among group members. The manual codings were treated as observed variables and the theory of turn taking in conversation was used to model temporal dependencies among interaction links, forming a Dynamic Bayesian Network (DBN). The DBN was modeled using the Bayes Net Toolkit and parameters were learned using Expectation Maximization (EM) algorithm. The Viterbi algorithm was adapted to perform the inference in DBN. The result is a time series of linkages for arbitrarily long segments that utilizes statistical distributions to estimate linkages. The validity of the method was assessed through comparing the accuracy of automatically detected links to manually identified links. Results show adequate validity and suggest routes for improvement of the method.     

Physical activity in the life of a woman with cerebral palsy: physiotherapy,social exclusion,competence, and intimacy

Although physical activity can have substantial mental and physical health benefits, people with cerebral palsy usually lead sedentary lives. To understand, at an individual level, this inactivity, we interviewed a 29-year-old minimally active woman with cerebral palsy (Alana) about the meanings and experiences of physical activity throughout her life. Using a case-study approach, we found that Alana had adverse childhood experiences with physical activity, including: having to perform difficult, and sometimes painful, physiotherapy; wearing callipers to assist her walking; demonstrating limited competence at physical activity; being excluded from physical education and other organised physical activity at school; and feeling socially isolated from her classmates. These experiences seemed to contribute to feelings of difference/inferiority and the subsequent avoidance of physical activity, which, in turn, might have contributed to premature functional decline. Physical activity levels in people with cerebral palsy might be increased through focusing on enhancing childhood experiences.